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How shocking it was to discover these real things were not real.

To fulminate, to go on a tear, because what’s wanted is forbidden.

Our visions of the world fade like the morning star, lost in the light of day.

A man sits in the Institute of National Memory examining files.

Of course he escaped. He would be the one. My legendary brother.

No fountains to quench the thirst between rounds of tag.

Just before four in the morning, the dog barks, the headlights appear.

The little door would appear in my mind’s eye, except that now it was ajar.

Sometimes a story is like a beehive. Sometimes an idea is like a poem.

Stop her there, on the bank of knowingness, just before spring.

What would make a sane person want to watch such blood sport?

She could not remember what Past and Present stood for.

Years they sought her, whose crew left on the water a sad Welsh hymn.

The pain lithified to numbness, and she recalled the time of his courtship.

I hear myself giving advice in my father’s voice: Take the emotion out.

Joanie’s face was something she’d borrowed from Miró, from Picasso.

Love cannot override what cells do in the nighttime of our bodies.

I understood that for us there would be no mourning the shortstop.

When he kisses me, my heart flutters in my chest like swarming bees.

What humanity needed was that gravity-defying miracle, the bird.

The past, you hear it, the small hours, sucked down the undertow.

Outside of Ikea’s window the nighttime wind tilts like a folk song.

There would be no one to live for; she would live for herself.

He glowered even as a little child. Maybe because he has your bad eyes.

Her bra is black, her breasts full and white. There is too much flesh.

Between me and the sky is a screen door and a whole mess of wind.

At a red light he touches his cheek. The stubbly skin is sensitive, febrile.

Forgive my father, the promise that he made, that I could turn all this to gold.

Strange then, strange now, that language wants to be alone with me.

It is right that tears fall for something small and forgotten. And I would never scold the onion for causing tears.